Your bulletins should be in TDCF

“The Commission agreed on the deadline of November 2014 to stop the parallel distribution of TAC and TDCF data for the category 1 as well as the category 2 (satellite observations) and 4 (marine data). After November 2014, the TAC may be used only for the exchange of data between two NMHS under bilateral agreement.”

BUFR Migration Tool is designed to help you resolve
some of the severe issues with development of your National Migration Plan,
allowing to generate BUFR observations without an immediate upgrade of observing hardware/software,
and at the same time to provide backward compatibility for legacy systems based on Traditional Alphanumeric
Codes until those are upgraded or replaced.

In accordance with the WMO TDCF Migration Plan, (Table Driven Code Forms
such as BUFR) was completed in November 2010. By November 2014 dual dissemination
of BUFR and TAC bulletins might be terminated. After this date, meteorological
observations such as SYNOP, TEMP, PILOT, CLIMAT should not be disseminated to GTS network (UK, Ireland and Netherland
has already announced termination of dissemination of TAC SYNOP bulletins). Instead,
observations all over the world should be transmitted in BUFR/CREX.

TDCF Migration is a process of preparing every National Meteorological Service for this step.

Is your NMS ready for observations in BUFR by this November?

If you do not migrate...

Besides category 1 data migration which is
due this year, WMO plans to have all other
meteorological data being interchanged in
TDCF in the following years. Therefore without
reliable support of TDCF in your system you will
not be able to communicate with rest of the
meteorological world, to understand the data
received as well as to send data to others.

Indeed Migration is long and difficult process consisting of several steps and at the end it most likely requires to upgrade and/or to change of your current hardware and software. This could be very costly and quite often even not possible due to missing support for legacy software.

BUFR migration tool is designed to help
National Meteorological Services in their
process of migration to Table Driven Code
Forms (TDCF) and to play a key role in
developing the National Migration Plan. It is
based on “Migration by Zones” concept which
allows continuous use of your current systems
until they are upgraded or retired.

With BUFR migration tool your way to TDCF could be much smoother and less complicated. BUFR migration
tool offers you standalone solution for transparent, fully-automated bi-directional conversion while adding
proper metadata. TDCF descriptor tables and TM templates
can be updated without software change.

Key Benefits of BUFR Migration Tool

Flexible way towards TDCF codes
— it brings bidirectional bridging between TDCF and TAC which allows you to generate
TDCF bulletins without an immediate upgrade of observing hardware/software (leading to cost saving).
You can issue your observations in BUFR/CREX simply by re-creating them from existing
TAC codes with additional metadata or data.

Support legacy systems
— continue using your TAC-consuming systems until they are upgraded or retired as scheduled,
because TDCF data arriving from other RTH/NMC’s can be converted back to their TAC for legacy systems,
where possible. Please consider that existing systems might not be easy to upgrade because:

they are not maintained or developed any longer,

they cannot be adapted to new compilers or operating systems,

original developers are no longer available,

implementing the change is too expensive.

Re-creating old codes from BUFR prolongs usability of
your current systems to allow proper development of
new tools and migration when ready part-by-part.

Service Oriented Architecture
— the BUFR Migration
Tool provides REST, SOAP or file input/output
interfaces, so it can be easily integrated with your
message switching system.

External SQL database integration
— together with
Moving Weather switching system it allows direct
compilation of BUFR bulletins out of your external
observation database, as well as to decode TDCF data
and store it directly into your SQL tables.

Open for updates
— system is driven by XML-based
configuration, new formats can be simply supported
just by adding new transformation rules.

Generated data fully conforms to relevant WMO standards and recommendations
— Output is compliant with WMO IPET-DRC templates.
Input is backward compatible with various BUFR editions and template revisions.
Therefore you can be sure you are producing TDCF messages in accordance with current
standards while you can still understand other parties not on the same level of compliance.

In case you consider upgrading also your Automated Message Switching System, we are happy to offer you our Moving Weather which provides you significant advantages! First of all it has BUFR migration tool already integrated with Graphical user interface, so you can control the process directly from message switch. Moreover, since Moving Weather is best and most advanced WMO message switching system available, it is already compatible with WIS capability (WMO Information System). It can be upgraded to WIS system Discover Weather at any time you need it.

We are proud to propose to you easy and understandable guidance on how to migrate to TDCF in a very convenient and simple way, using using the most user-friendly tool available.